It's tough to keep up: are the rightwingers all ignorant inbred hillbillies (clinging to their guns & religion) or are they nefarious super-smart tech lovers using their l33t skillz to hack the Gibson that is the body politic?

I'm glad we can still rely on the Guardian to keep us well-informed and alert about how those nefarious rightwingers are distorting and manipulating our media and search engines. Bless you, Guardian, for doing what needs to be done to give our free and honest press, and the disinterested owners of tech gateways, a fighting chance against these fascists.

Didn't The Guardian get the memo that Jews are evil? I mean, with West Bank construction and war crimes in Gaza and saber rattling toward Iran and that madman Bibi insulting O and building a racist Apartheid wall against supposed terror and denying water or concrete or whatever to the poor Palestinians, surely even The Guardian knows by now that Jews are uniquely evil. Left and right have converged, again.

It's tough to keep up: are the rightwingers all ignorant inbred hillbillies (clinging to their guns & religion) or are they nefarious super-smart tech lovers using their l33t skillz to hack the Gibson that is the body politic?

This is silly stuff even by the standards of the New Red Scare. Someone looking for a sweeping generalization about a group is going to be directed mostly to stuff written by that group's enemies? Who knew?

She's doing to Trump voters and Brexit supporters the same thing the organized anti-Semites do to the Jews, ascribe to them all sorts of nefarious motives, dark alliances, secret powers, then call for something to be done about them. She's no less of an ignorant, paranoid crank than those she was so horrified to discover were posting online.

There's a whole lot of breathless at that article. That map is beautifully manipulated.

“I scraped the trackers on these sites and I was absolutely dumbfounded. Every time someone likes one of these posts on Facebook or visits one of these websites, the scripts are then following you around the web. And this enables data-mining and influencing companies like Cambridge Analytica to precisely target individuals, to follow them around the web, and to send them highly personalised political messages. This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.”

... The writer does know when people on the right say "Hitler did nothing wrong," they are using it sarcastically to make fun of the people on the left who insist that there are no universal truths or who support dictators like Castro, right?

More bull shit: When I type Jew in Google, the first result I get is Wiki, JewFAQ.org and the World Jewish Congress. JewWatch.org doesn't show up on the first page at all. Did she bother to check if, in 10 years, Google's algorithm had solved this problem that I can in no way verify?

Matthew Sablan is right. I tried it and I didn't get "Are Jews evil" as an option. However, once you have typed "are Jews evil", the next time you type "are Jews...", the question "are Jews evil" will probably come up as an option. The same thing happens if you type in "are Pugs evil". And there are people posting articles and videos about the evils of Pugs.

Charlie Beckett, a professor in the school of media and communications at LSE, tells me: “We’ve been arguing for some time now that plurality of news media is good. Diversity is good. Critiquing the mainstream media is good. But now… it’s gone wildly out of control. What Jonathan Albright’s research has shown is that this isn’t a byproduct of the internet. And it’s not even being done for commercial reasons. It’s motivated by ideology, by people who are quite deliberately trying to destabilise the internet.”

This is the money graph. Call for censorship. Regulate on-line speech so that the "wrong" people don't spread "dangerous lies."

Which will of course be anything those in power find inconvenient in any way.

It may not be the browser's autocomplete, but something does autocompletes, and they are tailored to my previous searches. I am thinking that it is Google, since I move around platforms a lot (2 PCs, laptop, 3 iPads, and an iPhone). Just like I get Amazon ads in the middle of articles that correspond very closely to stuff I searched for or bought there. I am still getting quick disconnect battery cable ads (and, indeed, battery cable related ads in general) from a set I bought in August. The problem is that I tend to stay signed onto Google (esp. for this blog), Amazon, etc. on a fairly continuous basis. Life online is just easier if you stay signed onto these core companies. So, to truly test things out, you probably need to sign out of Google, etc., and also purge your cookies (where your account names are maintained), while purging your viewing history.

This whole thing cuts both ways. I know liberal people who get most of their "news" from their Facebook feeds and are scared that Trump is about to unleash hordes of skinheads on them. When I tell them that FB's algorithms give them mainly what they "want" to see, based on their past usage of FB and what the algos can glean of their preferences, so as rigid liberals they only see one side (as would rigid conservatives), they look at me like they have never heard this before.

FB is not being evil, they have sound business reasons to make the space they give their users a good place for advertisers. A happy person is more likely to buy things, so give 'em what they want. Can't fault Zuck for that.

The issue will not be settled by censorship, it can only be addressed by people becoming smarter about their sources of information. If they insist on staying stuck on stupid, we will all eventually reap the consequences.

holdfastYeah, because the British hard Left has always been such a friend to the Jews. Well, OK, a friend to Jews with names like Feliks Derzinsky.

If you are referring to the founder of the Soviet secret police, a.k.a. Felix Dzerzhinsky, we find out that Felix Dzerzhinsk was raised as a Roman Catholic,as a child he wanted to become a Jesuit priest, and his family belonged to the Polish nobility. Not to many Jewish folk among the Polish nobility.

Some old Bolsheviks who were Jewish were Leon Trotsky and Lazar Kaganovich,a Stalinist appartchik who died five months before the demise of the Soviet Union.

holdfastYeah, because the British hard Left has always been such a friend to the Jews. Well, OK, a friend to Jews with names like Feliks Derzinsky.

If you are referring to the founder of the Soviet secret police, a.k.a. Felix Dzerzhinsky, we find out that Felix Dzerzhinsk was raised as a Roman Catholic,as a child he wanted to become a Jesuit priest, and his family belonged to the Polish nobility. Not to many Jewish folk among the Polish nobility.

Some old Bolsheviks who were Jewish were Leon Trotsky and Lazar Kaganovich,a Stalinist appartchik who died five months before the demise of the Soviet Union.

I agree that Danny Sullivan is the person to talk to but I got the feeling from the article that he was just reacting to her statements about the results she had gotten. I don't know what suggestions they were getting that led to "are women evil" I didn't get that as an auto-complete and when I Googled that question, the top result was a Salon article.

It's been harder for people to manipulate search results since the Penguin update (2012). No more Google bombs, but there can still be curious auto-completes. Those are influenced by the sites available and by what people are searching for. (I know Google looks at what you've searched for before and I wouldn't be surprised if it also made suggestions based on what people with a similar browsing history look for.) It could be that a TV show, a celebrity, or a politician said something about evil women. Or maybe there was a meme that was hot at that time. During the election, for example, typing "Hillary for p" got "Hillary for prison" as a top result. "Cruz is" got "Cruz is the Zodiac killer".

That's not to say that Google doesn't do some manipulation. Type in "Muslims are terrorists" and look at the top result.

Really LOL. As I was reading that I thought, oh FFS doesn't she even know how marketing on the Internet works?? Then later I was astonished to learn that there are people who think Jews and women are evil and some of them actually have websites promoting their beliefs and those websites will show up in search engines. I mean, can you imagine? Most troubling, however, was discovering that the types of results I see and their order has an impact on my perspective. Necessarily. I didn't realize I was so impressionable. Presumably, if Google autocompletes my search of "Jews are" with "evil," I'm in great danger of starting to think Jews are in fact evil.

After that, I got bored and stopped reading. I did see, though, that the next article down says Google has altered its search autocomplete to remove the "Jews are evil" and "women are evil" choices.

I quite enjoyed that her solution to the problem of people taking to the internet to claim that certain Jews have acquired vast fortunes and influence through shadowy means, was to write a column for the Guardian warning that we need to investigate what the billionaires who run Facebook and Google are up to.